Composing a Life

tedium by incorporating the processes of learning and experimentation. I theorize about cooking, serve newly invented dishes to guests, and frustrate my family’s desire for affirmations of the familiar by being unable to replicate last week’s successes.
    If you don’t inherit a cuisine, as is the case with more and more American women, the nature of cooking changes. Newly learned recipes do not specify the gender of the cook, calling for “one maiden aunt, one hungry husband, one young wife desperate to please” along with the flour and oil. In order for Barkev to move away from patriarchal expectations of being served and not helping in the kitchen, it may have been necessary for us to discover a cuisine that was foreign to both of us. For those with cosmopolitan palates and ample incomes, the alternative to convenience foods and take-out is the culinary upward mobility of the eighties. Either approach is a way of redesigning food preparation so that men are willing to participate.
    For Alice and Jack, gourmet cooking was not a solution but an end in itself. The natural environment of their relationship was the kitchen. Every person of importance to Jack was invited to join in, first in companionable kibitzing around the kitchen table while an array of white wines and interesting hors d’oeuvres appeared as the preparation lengthened, and later as we sat down for the full feast. Deeper layers of friendship involved sharing the search for ingredients or the reduction of sauces after the baking of bones and herbs in the oven. By his enthusiasm, Jack inspired an interest in cooking in both men and women, although cooking was not a new interest for Alice, for whom it is the continuing affirmation of a European identity. What would once have been exotic now fits. Not surprisingly, food was carried from the Riverbend household to the labs and offices of Demonics. After Jack’s death, Alice continued to use food to symbolize the working relationships she was trying to promote, setting a table of delicacies at Christmas and organizing an elegant catered dinner when the company went public.
    In the nineteenth century, a young woman named Ellen Richards, trained in chemistry and unable to work in her field, announced the foundation of a new science she called oekology, or the science of living. This was the discipline later called domestic science or home economics, involving the effort to professionalize and dignify the work of the housewife by drawing on science and technology. * A single Greek root,
oekos
, has wandered through changing conceptions of human living, as well as changing fashions in spelling, producing the contemporary fields of economics and ecology, which frequently seem to be at odds. It also offers the less well-known term ekistics, coined by the city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to refer to a science of human settlement that would include the architectural creation of human spaces, their social and economic integration, and their relationship with the natural environment. Each of these latter-day coinages represents an incomplete view, but together they represent a view that includes biology and architecture, kitchens and stock exchanges, the growth of meadows and children as well as the GNP. In every case, we can visualize ourselves as consumers or as old-fashioned husbands who expect to be served, or we can take a share of responsibility for every-day life as a sustainable weave of effort and enjoyment which builds up rather than breaking down.
    What we need today is not to apply more technology to housework, or even to teach those who do housework to avoid nonbiodegradable detergents or aerosols. We must transform our attitude toward all productive work and toward the planet into expressions of homemaking, where we create and sustain the possibility of life. It may take yet another new word to express the single responsibility that unites the homemaker, male or female, with the men and women who mine and plant and create industries and work for effective forms of exchange and for a peaceful world. Such a new term might be
ecopoiesis
, using the Greek root for
making
that gives us the word
poetry
. Still, the making of words or rhymes is insufficient; the problem is with our understanding of the materialities that make life possible: the forests and the cooking pots, the necessary recuperation time of fields and workers, the private spaces of our lives where the spirit flourishes, and the